Analyzing and refuting the inaccuracies lodged against the lgbt community by religious conservative organizations. Lies in the name of God are still lies.

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Sean Hannity once helped to push propaganda about gays, gerbils, and bodily wastes

Hannity

Sean Hannity is one of the personalities on Fox News aiding religious right groups push the false talking point that the lgbt community is intolerant of "other view points" and want to silence people.

Based on an interestingly nauseating incident which took place in 1989, Hannity should really know better. Decades before he was a bombastic, fact-free pseudo news personality, he was a shock jock who got fired from a California college radio station due to a interview which has to be heard (complete with a barf bag) to be believed. According to Media Matters:

Before becoming a prominent Fox News personality, Sean Hannity was
fired from a local radio show for peddling a number of extremely
disparaging smears about gay people, including the myth that gay men are
prone to disease because they consume each other's feces during sex.

In his new book The Loudest Voice in the Room, New York magazine
journalist Gabriel Sherman describes the start of Sean Hannity's career
as a conservative radio personality, beginning with an hour-long
morning call-in show at KCSB, the UC Santa Barbara college station. The
short-lived show was canceled in 1989 after Hannity made a number of extreme anti-gay remarks during a segment featuring Gene Antonio, author of the book The AIDS Cover-up? The Real and Alarming Facts About AIDS. According to Sherman:

In April 1989, Hannity invited the virulent anti-gay activist Gene
Antonio on the air to promote his already widely discredited book, The
AIDS Cover-up? The Real and Alarming Facts About AIDS. A Lutheran
minister without scientific training, Antonio peddled paranoid fictions
about the epidemic. He wrote that the virus could be transmitted by
sneezes and mosquito bites and that the Centers for Disease Control and
the American Medical Association conspired to cover up the "truth."

At the opening of his hour-long interview, Hannity said: "I'm sick
and tired of the media and the homosexual community preventing us from
getting the true, accurate information about AIDS in this day." He went
on to describe The AIDS Cover-up? as an "excellent book" that was "so
full of facts" and added, "if you want the real truth about this deadly,
deadly disease, he's not afraid to say what the homosexuals don't want
you to hear." He gave his audience Antonio's mailing address, where they
could order "autographed copies" and write to find out about "places
where homosexuals can go for help if they want to change." [The Loudest Voice in the Room, pg 239]

ANTONIO: [T]hey have had meetings, literally, of the SPCA, the
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Dallas and elsewhere
around the country, because these homosexuals were cutting the claws
off of gerbils, and prying their teeth out, and stuffing them up their
rectums. It's called gerbil stuffing.

HANNITY: Oh, my God.

CALLER: I believe you. They're getting sick with it. Crazy.

ANTONIO: It's just this perversion. They don't know what to do.
They're frantic in the search for a substitute woman. They put fists up
the rectum.
[...]

HANNITY: And then they wonder why they have so many diseases, you know? I
don't understand it. But they won't let you say that they have a
disease. They won't let you say it's a gay disease and they won't let
you examine the practices that have caused them, making them so
susceptible to these diseases. [KCSB, 4/4/89, emphasis added]

And then there was the talk about gay men and bodily wastes:

ANTONIO: These men eat one another's fecal matter. And people say, "what are you talking, that is bizarre, what are you talking about?" This is called scat.

HANNITY: You just blew the whole audience out of Santa Barbara, I'll have you know.

ANTONIO: Well that is reality, though.

HANNITY: It is.

ANTONIO: If you pick up a copy of the homosexual magazines, they have
advertisements for giving and receiving enemas. And these are not
fringe magazines. These are the standard fare of the homosexual
subculture ... It is a subculture of people engaging in deviant, twisted
acts. So they literally will defecate in one another's mouth. [KCSB, 4/4/89, emphasis added]

Unbelievably, the interview got worse as Hannity and Antonio get into the subject of gays and children. Needless to say, lgbts were furious about this interview:

Gay rights groups called for a boycott of the station following the
segment, eventually convincing the station's management to take Hannity
off the air in June for violating the school's non-discrimination
policy. Hannity, with the help of the Santa Babara and Los Angeles chapters
of the American Civil Liberties Union, launched a "free speech campaign"
against the station and pressured the university to agree to reinstate
his program. When the university refused to double the length and
duration of his show, however, Hannity declined to return to as the
program's host.

I would advise folks who are shocked or angry at this revelation regarding Hannity not push for his dismissal from Fox News. It ain't going to happen. Although I do wonder if Hannity still believes the trash he pushed about lgbts.

Instead, let's look at the similarities between anti-gay propaganda then and now because there are quite a few.

1. We have a on-air personality repeat some of the nastiest lies about the lgbt community and then whine about free speech when he got called on it? Sounds like the recent 'Duck Dynasty situation,' doesn't it?

2. The claims about the lgbt community regarding gerbils and feces would be funny except for two things. It was these claims which played a huge part in Uganda pushing that awful anti-gay law. In 2010 Ugandan pastor Martin Ssempa, a strong supporter of the law, would show videos supposedly of gay men engaging in the behavior Antonio described.

The connotation of the lies never changes even if the words are carefully picked. Decades after that interview, the lgbt community still has to deal with these lies and to my knowledge, we haven't collectively as a community done anything to call attention to them.

It's something we should not only remember, but call out with as much fervor as we ponder the dating lives of lgbt celebrities.

1 comment:

Erica Cook
said...

I'm a lesbian, and I admit that anal sex in general is about as appealing to me as oral sex with a woman is to a gay man and even I get the enema thing. How they go from that to eating feces I'll never understand. When I first heard it I thought it was a misunderstanding of rimming.

About Me

Alvin McEwen is 46-year-old African-American gay man who resides in Columbia, SC.
McEwen's blog, Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters, and writings have been mentioned by Americablog.com, Goodasyou.org, People for the American Way, PageOneQ.com, The Washington Post, Raw Story, The Advocate, Media Matters for America, Crooksandliars.com, Thinkprogress.org, Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, Melissa Harris-Perry, The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, The Washington Blade, and Foxnews.com.
In addition, he is also a past contributor to Pam's House Blend,Justice For All, LGBTQ Nation, and Alternet.org. He is a present contributor to the Daily Kos and the Huffington Post,
He is the 2007 recipient of the Harriet Daniels Hancock Volunteer of the Year Award and the 2010 recipient of the Order of the Pink Palmetto from the SC Pride Movement as well as the 2009 recipient of the Audre Lorde/James Baldwin Civil Rights Activist Award from SC Black Pride. In addition, he is a three-time nominee of the Ed Madden Media Advocacy Award from SC Pride.